


Prayer in Purgatory

by grey2510



Series: Misc SPN One Shots (<10k words) [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Castiel in Purgatory, Dean in Purgatory, Implied Relationships, M/M, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 19:40:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3662538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grey2510/pseuds/grey2510
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Benny meets Dean in Purgatory and tries to figure out why the hunter is so determined to find the angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prayer in Purgatory

It had taken Benny weeks to track down the human in Purgatory, the human that had been whispered about in the dark corners of the woods. It was strange that in the land of monsters, one human had put the fear of…well, not God…into some of the beasts who were newer to this plane of existence, the ones who had been topside and had either been put in Purgatory by the Winchesters themselves or had heard of the brothers’ exploits.

Apparently, the Winchesters were the monsters’ monsters under the bed. And now one of them was tearing his way through Purgatory, and if the rumors were true, he was doing it all to save a ragged angel.

The only part of the rumors Benny cared about was the fact that there was a human soul in Purgatory and that it might be his ticket out. Everything else was just details.

Two days before he officially met Dean Winchester, he watched him, studied him, saw him fight off creatures he had no right defeating, observed the fierceness and determination with which he interrogated beast after beast about the angel.

Yes, this human would suffice. Benny might just make it out of here after all.

Their first meeting was rough—threats of violence and all that—but what else could you expect down here? If Benny had known at the time about Dean and the angel’s first meeting, he might have laughed and asked if anyone had ever told the hunter that stabbing people in the chest was a terrible way to make friends.

But on that day, he just needed Dean to believe he didn’t want to kill him and that he really did know a way out of Purgatory. Everything else about the angel came later.

And there was a lot about the angel that Benny eventually learned.

When Dean first told him that the only way he would agree to take Benny through the portal with him was if they found the angel first, Benny assumed it was just about loyalty, or maybe Dean figured the celestial being’s power would be good in a fight.

It wasn’t until the third night that Benny realized it might be more.

Each night they had camped, Benny had seen Dean raise his eyes to the jet black sky, saw his lips move in silent prayer. Even though Dean was friends with an angel, Benny was surprised to see such devotion from the human; he seemed more like a man of action than a man of spiritual faith. But maybe being sent to Purgatory was enough to bring out the piety in the man, and Benny couldn’t really blame him. If he thought God listened to vampires, he might have sent up a few prayers himself. Before he had become a vampire, he had been a fairly religious man—not that there was really any other kind of man to be in Louisiana back when he was alive—so he understood faith, even if the memories were distant.

But the third night had been different. Benny had been returning from checking their perimeter when he heard the human’s voice through the trees. He stopped, ears cocked, eyes scanning the woods for whoever or whatever Dean was talking to. There was no one, just the heavy breath of the forest and the suffocation of night around them.

“…hope you’re listening, Cas. You know I don’t really like praying, and I’m gonna feel like a real jackass if I find out I’ve just been talking to myself.”

Ah, the angel. Maybe those prayers had been more strategic than he thought. Why pray to a distant God when there was angel who might appear in all his smiting glory? Why track a celestial being for weeks when a simple prayer might end the search?

Benny was about to continue to the campsite, but the rest of the prayer stopped him. He didn’t think he was supposed to hear this.

“I know we got our problems, man. I know I was pissed at you about Sam and Crowley and not wanting to fight and for dying in the lake and for not remembering who you were. But I just got you back, and I thought…I dunno… I thought once Dick was gone maybe we could fix things. And now we’re in this fucking place and you’re gone again. I know you probably had a good reason to bail. I’m sorry about all of this, Cas. But I’m coming to find you, we’ll get out of this and we can go home, ok? Get back to Sammy, and you and I can…hell, I don’t know. It’ll get better. I need you, Cas. Not gonna lie, having your feathery ass drop in for a good ol’ smiting or two would be damn helpful these days.” Dean paused. “Where are you, Cas?” he continued in almost a whisper. “Wherever you are, you better be alive and ok, or else I’ll kill you, you hear?” Dean chuckled weakly at that. “Anyway, Cas. Signing off.”

Benny waited a minute before returning to the camp, still not sure what to make of what he had just heard. Besides, Dean wasn’t a friend. Sure, Benny liked the guy well enough, all things considered. But this was Purgatory: friendship usually got you killed.

Benny hoped this angel wouldn’t get them killed.

 

The path through the woods was typically overgrown and tangled; it was almost as beastly as the predators that stalked it endlessly. There was rarely little opportunity to talk: if half their attention was focused on not getting tripped up by the vines and stumps and ankle-twisting sinkholes in the soft dirt, the other half was always on alert and scanning the foliage for the next attack.

Five days after Benny heard the prayer, the path cleared for a while and they moved swiftly and silently, blades always at the ready. The forest was still for a change; maybe the beasts had learned to give the human and the vampire a wide berth.

“So why we bothering with this angel, brother?” Benny was not sure when he started calling Dean 'brother' and meaning it. He had always said it, the word just rolling off his tongue, but now it was starting to be more than that. It had been a long time since Benny had had any sort of friendship—real friendship, not an uneasy alliance—and the wariness of the truce with Dean had started to mellow. Dean did not belong here; his heart was too pure, too good for this place.

“I told you: that’s the deal. We find Castiel, you get a soul ride outta here.”

“Yeah, I get that. I mean, why do _you_ care about finding the angel?”

“What can I say? I’m a sucker for bad jokes: a man, a vampire, and an angel walk through Purgatory…”

“Fuck you, Dean. The only reason I’m helping you find this angel is to get myself outta here. I’d like to know why it’s so important to _you_ that I risk _my_ ass over this.”

Dean stopped walking and Benny was surprised to see the blade hang loosely in the hunter’s grip before he recovered, wiping a dirty sleeve across his brow. His face was set, his eyes were hard. In a strange way, in that moment, Purgatory looked…right…on Dean. It shouldn’t, and Benny stood by his assessment of the man’s heart, but that heart beat in the body of a man who had seen and done terrible things, who would do them again and even more, for those who kept that heart beating strong. The hunter sighed.

“Me ‘n Cas, we’ve…we’ve seen some serious shit together. And, well, this last thing practically broke him. Can’t just leave him here. Cas is powerful as hell, but he might not be, you know, all together in the head right now.”

Benny knew better than to comment on the mental health of this angel they were tracking. Let that one lie for the time being.

“Uh huh. You think he hears your prayers?”

Dean’s hand, which had been running through his hair froze, then dropped to his side. Panic flashed across his face before it settled into a stony glare.

It was all Benny could do not to chuckle darkly at this. What a fucked up place they were in and what a fucked up human he was traveling with. Monsters? Fine. Get caught praying to an angel? Panic.

“You heard me?” Dean could barely meet Benny’s eyes.

“You don’t pray as quiet as you think, brother.”

“Damn your Vulcan hearing,” Dean muttered, then gave a bitter half-smile when Benny didn’t respond to that. “Never mind. After your time, I’m guessing.”

Dean started walking down the path again, and Benny was more than willing to follow; they had been in one place too long and the openness of the path here felt naked and exposed. He almost missed the suffocating underbrush they had left behind, and were sure to encounter again. They walked silently for a few minutes, but Benny still had questions.

“How’d you end up in the same foxhole as an angel, anyway? You don’t exactly seem like the church-going type—not even one of them Christmas and Easter Catholics.”

At this, Dean actually laughed, and it echoed strangely in the clearing before the forest stifled it.

“This ain’t my first trip to the afterlife. Been to Heaven and Hell. Figured it was time to get my frequent flyer card punched for Purgatory, too.”

“You got a trip upstairs? I guess that’s one way to meet an angel.”

Dean barked another laugh.

“Actually, I technically met him in Hell, but I don’t remember that part. He, uh, he raised my soul from the pit.”

Now it was Benny’s turn to stop.

“He saved you from Hell?”

“Yeah,” Dean said, unconsciously rubbing his left shoulder, but he stopped when he realized what he was doing. Benny absently wondered what that was all about.

“Huh. A soul rescued by an angel? I didn’ realize I was keepin’ company with such high society. Woulda put on my Sunday best for ya, if Ida known,” Benny joked, letting his Southern roots out more than he had in a long time.

“Fuck you, man.” But there was no malice in the remark. Dean still looked uncomfortable, and Benny finally let the subject drop. For now.

           

For a few nights after that, Dean stopped praying out loud, even when Benny wasn’t nearby. But, the vampire still saw him look to the sky every night, sometimes his lips moving slightly, sometimes not.

One night after fighting some Lovecraftian horrors with far too many limbs and eyes, Benny had noticed how Dean’s eyes shone in the dull moonlight while his lips moved in silent prayer. That fight had been a close call, and each of them had nearly died, only to be saved by the other. Benny had pulled Dean up from the ground, out from under a decapitated Thing, and had seen fear and failure on the hunter’s face before he shook it off with a gruff “Thanks.”

Here and there, they caught whispers and rumors, often bloodily extracted from their keepers, of the angel’s movements through the twisted forest. It must have been a month before they got their first solid lead: the angel was by the water down the path. Dean had smirked coldly as he threatened the creature, and almost seemed to relish the kill once he had learned all he could from the thing. Benny wondered how long the goodness in Dean’s heart would last in this place.

It also surprised Benny that he, undead vampire, cared at all.

Maybe he could go legit topside. Maybe if a hunter like Dean could bend his moral code for a monster like himself, he had a chance of finding that in the real world. He had almost found it with Andrea. Maybe he could find it again.

The search for the angel grew more determined, now that they had a clear destination. Benny had to force Dean to stop at night; Dean was no good to him tired and weak. And not just that—Benny knew what that reckless determination could do to a man, how it could destroy him. He couldn’t let that happen to his friend.

Dean started praying aloud again. Something in him seemed to have shifted, unblocked. Benny still stayed away a bit when he heard the prayers. They weren’t for him, and even though Dean didn’t seem to care anymore that Benny knew, it still didn’t feel right for him to be there. If he were praying to Andrea, he wouldn’t have wanted Dean to listen.

During the day, there was no more discussion. They had to find the angel. They were close. So close that it seemed to scare Dean, as though he thought the angel would be ripped from his grasp at the last minute.

Benny understood, but the more desperate Dean became, the more the vampire resented the angel.

If this angel was so powerful, so important to Dean, why did he abandon him? Why didn’t he answer Dean’s calls?

If Benny was going to save this angel, it better be worth it.

           

The day they found the angel pained Benny. The hope and excitement on his friend’s face as he rushed down the embankment and wrapped the being in the tattered trenchcoat in a tight embrace was such a drastic change from the grimness of the past weeks. The angel stood stiffly, only the closed eyes and the clenched fist by his side giving any indication that he was at all moved by the hunter’s presence.

After weeks of watching his friend send up prayer after prayer unanswered, watching him cut down creature after creature, watching the humanity slip away as monsters were threatened and killed in the name of saving the angel, the angel’s aloofness set Benny’s teeth on edge.

This? This battered excuse for a celestial being was what they had torn across Purgatory for? And now this angel couldn’t even find it in him to recognize Dean’s dedication and happiness and relief?

It was all he could do not throttle the angel right there. He didn’t, but that didn’t stop him from asking the questions Dean wouldn’t, that Dean couldn’t. Dean didn’t have it in him to believe Castiel had abandoned him without reason. The angel had been the hunter’s last hope, the light he’d moved towards and held in his heart.

“Why’d you bail on Dean?”

“Dude—”

“The way I hear it, you two hit monster land, and hot wings here took off. I figure he owes you some backstory.”

“Look, we were surrounded, okay? Some freak jumped Cas. Obviously, he kicked its ass, right?”

“No.” The angel’s response was so final, so resolute.

Dean’s face fell. Benny’s anger boiled.

“What?” the hunter asked.

“I ran away.

“You ran away?”

“I had to.”

“That’s your excuse for leaving me with those gorilla-wolves?”

“Dean—”

“You bailed out and, what, went camping? I prayed to you, Cas, every night.”

“I know.”

Benny had to look away. The light in the man’s face had gone out, and the vampire couldn’t watch, couldn’t let it fuel his rage. Benny knew there had been bad blood between the hunter and the angel in the past, and it was clear Dean was reliving it. _No, not again, Cas, not you, too_ , those green eyes said.

The vampire was more than ready to leave the broken angel and get the hell out. Return the favor, as it were. But of course Dean wouldn’t have it. He should have known Dean wouldn’t listen to him once the angel explained he’d left to draw the Leviathan away from Dean, to protect Dean. The hunter was a stubborn sonofabitch, and Castiel’s confession had made so much of the anger and betrayal fall from Dean’s face. Benny knew that look, and as much as he was not ready to forgive or trust the angel, he understood there would be no talking Dean out of it, even if the angel said it was too dangerous for him to go with Dean.

“Let me bottom-line it for you. I’m not leaving here without you. Understand?”

“I understand.”

So the bad joke trio left the shores and continued their quest for the escape hatch from Purgatory.

 

Benny knew the angel was lying, was holding something back from Dean, even if the hunter didn’t see it or want to admit it. The vampire didn’t want to bring it up either because even though he was technically a monster, that didn’t mean he wanted to watch Dean crumble in on himself like he almost had by the stream.

In the days since the hunter and angel had reunited, Dean had been almost… _happy_ , all things considered. During the first day after leaving the water, Benny kept catching Dean’s eyes flicking over to the angel as though he couldn’t believe Castiel was actually there beside them, or as if he secretly wondered if the angel would leave again. The glances were full of relief and care and reluctant trust and even a bit of fear.

Castiel seemed to have no concept of personal space, and either Dean didn’t mind or had become so used to it, that he didn’t notice. Benny wondered if it were not a combination of both. The two of them moved in concert, seemingly unaware at times of the their closeness and synchronicity.

Eventually it wasn’t just Castiel who would move closer to Dean: whenever red eyes glared at them through the bushes, circling for an attack, Benny saw how Dean moved instinctively towards the angel, often putting himself in front of Castiel. In any other circumstances, it might have been humorous: a mere human acting as a defense for a celestial being. But Benny knew it had nothing to do with ego or a real belief that Dean could defend Castiel better than the angel could himself. It was just what a person did for those they loved—whatever definition of love you chose. A few times, the vampire saw the hunter grab the sleeve of the trenchcoat and the wrist beneath. Maybe it was to make sure the angel didn’t leave again. Maybe it was in protection. Maybe it was in fear. Maybe it was in comfort and reassurance. Maybe it was in love.

But even through all this, Benny saw the hesitation in the angel. It was obvious that it had nothing to do with unrequited feelings (and it still shocked Benny that the angel could even be so…human…in this regard). If anything Benny was sure that the angel had been in love with the hunter for far longer than Dean had ever realized. If he had to guess, Dean was just figuring this all out for himself, now that Purgatory had stripped everything else away. Benny understood: back when he had been topside, anything not between a man and a woman was SIN, and even though decades as an undead monster had eradicated any opinions of morality he might have once held on that matter (however loosely), he figured society probably hadn’t changed all that much for normal folks. So the issue wasn’t with the angel’s love for the human.

Then again, maybe it was.

Whenever there was a threat or the subject of the portal came up, Castiel always expressed the dangers of the plan, how he should just leave Dean and Benny. Every time the angel suggested leaving, Benny saw the hurt and betrayal behind Dean’s angry insistence that they stick together, that the three of them were going to make it out of Purgatory. Benny still wasn’t a huge fan of Castiel, and if it weren’t for Dean, he certainly wouldn’t stick his neck out for the angel, but a part of Benny wanted to shake Dean and explain. Castiel wasn’t suggesting he leave because he didn’t love Dean. He was doing it _because_ he loved Dean. But Dean couldn’t see that; he only saw the abandonment. Despite his dislike of the angel, there was no way Benny was going to add to his friend’s suffering; he only hoped the angel would do the same.

But hope is dangerous in a place like Purgatory.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos appreciated!
> 
> Check out my other works (sorted by series for easier navigation):  
> [Grey's works](http://archiveofourown.org/users/grey2510/series)  
> Come visit me on Tumblr! @[grey2510](https://grey2510.tumblr.com/)


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